Bio: Tech company founder & leader for 21 years before selling the company to 8th Light. Director of 8th Light Los Angeles. Creator of WindyCityRails. Perpetual student. Currently exploring IoT, parallelism, and quantum computing.

Why I Use Vim

Vim is everywhere. I can find Vim on any 'nix-based machine: Unix, Linux, or OSX. I spend most of my time on OSX and the Ubuntu distribution of Linux. When I started experimenting with Raspberry Pi, it was pleasant to know that Vim was already there. Having a common editor on multiple platforms makes it easier to bounce between them.

Vim has history. I tried TextMate when I first heard about Ruby. Questions about TextMate’s future caused me to look for an alternative. Vim’s 20-year history and the Vim community convinced me that the editor would be available for many years to come.

Vim is fast. I laughed out loud the first time I sawNERDTree: Refreshing the root node.This could take a while… DONE
because it happened so quickly.

Vim can be customized. If I want to tailor Vim for myself, I can do that through plugins and .vimrc. If I don’t want to configure it myself, I can use a tool like Janus by Carl Lerche and Yehuda Katz . You may choose a different course. Choices are powerful!

The developers I admire are always learning. More important: They are strategic about what they learn because learning takes time. Being productive with a highly available editor like Vim means that I don’t have to spend time learning a new editor. Instead, I can focus my education in areas that benefit clients directly. That’s why I use Vim.